


True Hearts

by Pontmercyingtilthecowscomehome



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Complicated Relationships, Emotional, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Hoth, Valentine's Day, not fluffy, off screen mention of sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-12
Updated: 2019-02-12
Packaged: 2019-10-26 21:37:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,725
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17753933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pontmercyingtilthecowscomehome/pseuds/Pontmercyingtilthecowscomehome
Summary: On the eve of True Hearts' Day, Jyn reflects on the meaning of love, what she has with Cassian, and if she'll ever be enough.An introspective one-shot, inspired by Valentine's Day





	True Hearts

Jyn’s been with the Rebellion over a year now. That makes some things, like understanding her fellow X-wing pilot’s call signs and codes easier, and other things, so much harder. 

Like knowing that once the mission is over, so’s her sense of camaraderie with her squadron. It was strange, at first, to realize that despite all they had in common while they were in the heat of the battle, or even while they’re fulfilling their duties on base, there’s still… something they have that she doesn’t. Something that binds them together, that makes them connected in ways Jyn can’t quite parse. It’s like the Force, maybe, except she believes in that powerful connecting thread, for all it’s ever done her.

That’s not fair, she chids herself. Maybe it was the Force that got them all off Scarif. Or rather, more likely, it was that last minute rescue, one that she can still barely remember. Chirrut insisted that was the Force, that all good things flowed through it.

She’s not sure if she believes. But she does know that there’s a difference between the Force keeping her squadron alive while they’re locked in combat with some Imps, and the silent language of friendship the others share that her brain is incapable of translating for her. What else could it be? Why else could she fight by their side but never quite feel welcome on the same mess hall bench as them?

They all exit their X-wings at roughly the same time, all wearing the same uniform, they even all turn to check on their astromechs as soon as the droids are lowered to the ground. Hers, an ancient, faded green R-5 unit found in storage then painstakingly repaired by Cassian while he healed in the medbay, always spends more time fussing _at_ Jyn rather than being fussed over. Yuie, as she’s come to call R5-U8, proudly chirps that she is a _worrier_ not some _careless-good-for-nothing-hero-type_ which the sort of vindictive glee that Jyn is quite sure must come from a past spent interacting with the aforementioned hero-type.

But even Yuie has her own friends and so, once the wellness check is over, the droid wheels away. Jyn folds her arms as she walks, pretending the chill she feels is just the usual coldness of Hoth. She reminds herself, too, she has friends. Bodhi, though, is stationed on a far-off base, and Cassian, well, she hasn’t seen him since....

Since they’d finally had sex, three months ago. Neither of them had planned it, nor expected it. After all, Jyn had been curling up in his bunk for months now, a habit started while he was still in the Med Bay. She’d sat by his side every day, and in the nighttime, when his nightmares would come, she’d slip into the narrow hospital bed and hold him.

The nightmares faded as they’d weaned him off the painkillers for his back injury, but Jyn’s habit of falling asleep to the sound of his heartbeat hadn’t. So, the night he’d been moved to his own bed on Echo base, she’d padded through the dark halls to find him. 

When she entered his room, he wordlessly, had lifted the blanket to make room for her.

Those two things seem to define them, even now. Always knowing where the other one is and never using words. Not when an action would do.

Unfortunately, sometimes those actions ended up making things far more confusing than words might have. Because when the soft kiss on her cheek he gave her was met by her own fiery kiss, and then, by so much more, offered with no shyness, no fear, only the heat of a long simmering passion, Jyn had thought it signaled the start of something new for them.

And Cassian had meant it as a goodbye.

It was only after she returned to his room the next night, to find it swept clean (even cleaner than he usually keeps it), and both his pack and his leather coat missing, to know he was gone on another mission. The idiot hadn’t even left his pillows on the bed, so there was nothing, not the smallest ghostly whisper of his aftershave, to lull her to sleep. 

She hadn’t seen him since then. The ache of missing him had faded, dulling into a faint, ceaseless pain somewhere beneath her ribs, like a broken bone that had set wrong. At least her missions kept her busy, mostly. Today, as the other pilots rush off, as they always do, Jyn notices the hanger is even more quiet.

“What’s going on?” she asks Lilaah, one of the members of her squadron, as she finishes hanging up her piloting gear.

The half Twi’lek woman smiles. “Tomorrow’s True-Heart day, don’t you know?”

Jyn’s answer is a simple scoff. She’d heard of the holiday, ages ago. If she lets herself, she can even remember her parents exchanging simple homemade gifts for it. But that memory hurts too much, far too much, so she shoves it away. “You’d think we wouldn’t have time for that nonsense. Not in the middle of a war.”

“Isn’t a war all the more reason to celebrate love?” Lilaah replies. “For we never know when we’ll see our true loves again.”

Jyn wonders if anyone would notice if she simply hopped back into her X-Wing and tore off, back into hyperspace, back into the silence of space, far, far away from Echo Base. She’s part of the Rebellion, sure, but she wants no part in this. She can fight, she can die for a cause she believes in, but she can’t talk about love like she believes in that too.

“There’s a Friends Potluck,” Lilaah says, “if you’d prefer to go to that. We all have the day off so it’d be a nice way to relax.”

Relax? There’s no language in the galaxy that would make Jyn understand that word. It’s as bad as surrender, as vulnerability, as love. Those things, Jyn knows, simply make you a target to the stronger beings. The only way to relax is to trust someone to watch your back, and there’s no one on Echo Base Jyn shares that level of trust with.

Especially not now

She turns down the potluck, and than, as is her usual custom these days, spends the next few hours keeping herself busy. Checking her weapons, Checking her squadron’s weapons. Reviewing documents. Anything but going back to her small, empty room, and the cold bed there. True-Heart day. That’s bantha poodoo if she’d every heard any. What was a heart except an organ, pumping blood throughout a body growing more fragile by the day?

And even if she allowed herself to consider the metaphorical meaning of heart, well, even then the celebratory day falls apart. Because how could any emotion be true, when every one of them can be manipulated, exploited, used, by someone else?

Instead of sleeping, she goes to the sparring area, though it’s empty at this hour, and fights, and fights, and fights, against the holo-targets that so few others bother to use.

What’s the point in practicing martial arts, one of her fellow pilots had said, when you’ve got a blaster at your hip? 

But Jyn knows there’s plenty of times you don’t have a blaster, or a bed, or anyone to cover your back. She’s grateful for every scrap of luxury she’s found here in the Rebellion, Cassian included, but she knows better than to expect good things to last.

Or so she tells herself. Even as her vision blurs while she takes on the last few targets. Even as she curls up under his coat, in a corner of the sparring center, alone, and so cold. 

It’s her fault, she realizes. This loneliness. Love is like anything else precious, credits, resources, safety. All luxuries are scare, hoarded by those who have them, impossible for others to ever achieve. There’s not enough love in the galaxy for everyone. 

And there’s certainly none in her life. Not that she minds. Love is a weakness, the the emotional equivalent of the soft bits of an organic that she’s trained to hit first in a fight. 

She wakes to someone saying her name, softly. Her eyelids flutter, fighting the urge to fall back asleep. “Jyn,” the voice says again.

And now, she’s completely awake. Because it’s Cassian. He’s crouched in front of her, his hand held out, but not touching her, no, never without her permission. He looks a little worse for the wear, the shadows under his eyes darker, a bacta patch on his neck. There’s no indication of whatever role he’d played undercover, but Jyn has learned he hides those. Folds up the Imperial uniform or cuts his hair back to Rebellion standards before he ever returns to base.

She licks her dry lips, trying to find the words. “You.”

“Hey,” he says, and a strange smile that she realizes is nervousness plays on his smile. It makes him younger, softer. More the man he is in the soft quiet of night time, and less the soldier he is by day.

She looks at him for a moment before she lunges. Actions always come easier than words. Jyn moves toward him. Tangles her fingers in his hair, pulls him to her. He hesitates for only a moment, until his hands go to her hips, pinning her in place as much as she's keeping him close. The brush of his facial hair burns, just a little, and she lets out a soft noise she pretends is not a whimper. Kriff, she wants him. And by the way his fingers are already sliding under her coat, and then, under her shirt, the feeling is mutual. Which is exactly how they got themselves into this damn mess. She pulls back, slightly. Not enough to stop the kisses, just enough to slow them down. But her hands side down his back, feeling the coiled muscle, all the restraint he’s using to keep relatively still. He wants her, she realizes, and the idea feels like jumping into hyperspace without a ship. He tugs her bottom lip with his teeth, gentle, but so seductively. Her left hand tightens on where its slid own to his shoulder. "Here?" He asks, his voice already hoarse. Jyn is far from bashful, has never had much privacy to begin with, and considers it. His kisses move down her neck next, and her back arches against him, "Or bed?" 

Somehow those two little words jar her enough for her to stop completely. "No." She swallows. "We need to talk.” His expression closes. Freezes back into that calm levelness she used to mistake for a snide superiority. Now she sees it as the mask he uses to keep himself safe. Safe from even her. This is what caring gets her, Jyn thinks, All it does is make a mess of a perfectly good working relationship. But still, she tries. "You left." "I usually do, yes." "But we'd just..." 

He lifts one shoulder in an effortless shrug. "The order came a few hours later." 

Jyn stares. Reshuffles her order of events, the rage she’d been carrying for two months fading slightly. “So… we… didn’t… it wasn’t a goodbye?”

It’s Cassian’s turn to stare, his eyes never leaving hers. “I… no. I mean… we…”

His stuttering might be charming, if every word didn’t feel like a blow. “What am I to you, Cassian?”

The words echo far too ominously in the empty room. _Just say I’m a friend_ ,Jyn thinks, holding her breath. _Say that. Keep it simple. For both of us._

But of course, things have never been simple for them. “I suppose,” he says softly. “We should have this talk, yeah?”

An escape. He’s offering her an escape and kriffing hells she wants to take it. They don’t _have_ to have the talk. They can just kiss. Or head to the shooting range. Or argue. Or anything, anything at all but talk about feelings. Because she knows the minute they have to get honest about what they feel is the minute she’s going to be destroyed.

“I don’t love you,” she blurts out. “Just. Just to get that out of the way, all right? It’s a waste of time even think it. Love’s not real.”

“Is it?” 

“I’ve never seen it.” She tells herself that. Tells herself Galen and Lyra were performing a role, which makes no sense, of course, but keeps the pain away. “And I’ve been all over this galaxy. Love’s not real.”

Cassian’s fingers brush over her palm. She moves quickly to capture it, holding him there, her other hand trapping his. She can’t find the words to say how she likes his calluses, how she can feel the scars and results of years of hard work on his skin. Jyn can’t find any words around him, these days.

So she’s relieved when Cassian starts to speak. Or thinks she is, until she sees the pain in his eyes. “My parents had it. True love. A perfect connection. Whatever you want to call it. I remember… I remember them dancing in the kitchen together, the way they’d finish each other’s sentences, the way they’d sit, like two stars in perfect orbit around each other.” 

It’s far more a vivid memory than any Jyn feels comfortable sharing in return, so she just nods.

“And in the end, when my father died? When Mama opened the holomessage, heard the news… she…” He closes his eyes again. “My mother died from heartbreak, is what I’m saying.” He pauses. “And that’s why I can’t say it. I believe it exists, sure, but those who want it, they’re the fools. That’s not much of a opening line, is it?”

“I don’t come to you for poetry, Cass.”

He nods. “I guess what I mean is this. I might have seen love, in the past. But it didn’t save her. Didn’t protect him from blaster fire. So, I… I can’t offer you love. Not when I’ve seen how little that’s worth, in the end.”

His words are everything that she’d hoped to hear, and everything that she’d dreaded. But really, what else could he have said? If he’d confessed some deep, undying love, she’d have laughed in his face.

No, she thinks. Some people, like her, like him, just don’t win that lottery. Love isn't a guarantee in life. It’s nothing that can be fought for, nothing that can be earned. Some people have it in abundance and others… well, they get used to surviving on the scraps. To treasuring tiny moments that mean nothing to anyone with more. A nod, a smile, a hand to hold… when you’re too broken, too bitter for love, those little things mean all the more. 

Because Jyn doesn’t believe in love, but she believes in hope. She believes in Cassian. She believes in this small moment, more real than any memories of the love her parents may or may not have had.

True Hearts Day will just be a day like any other for them. They won’t exchange vows or even bits of poetry. They’ll go on living, go on fighting for a better galaxy, securing a safer place for people who are too busy swooning over each other to notice. And when the day is done, they’ll find each other again, like they always do. They don’t have love, but what they do have is real. 

“I can’t say I believe in love, either.” Cassian says, still holding her hand. Carefully, he moves, just a little closer. Close enough to kiss her, then whisper, “But I can offer you me. Everything I am. I’m yours.”

Jyn’s free hand moves to his hip, keeping him there. Keeping them in this small, perfect moment. “Yes,” she says, kissing his forehead, his closed eyes, his mouth. Seeing him as the flawed, beautiful man he is. Far less flawed than her, true, but, a jaded man all the same. They’re two broken halves, and though they'll never be a perfect fit, it’s still better than being without the other. “Yours.”

And for the two of them, that’s enough to be true. Enough to fill their hearts. Enough to move forward, together, hand-in-hand, into the dawn and away from the shadows of their past.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments welcome!


End file.
